ABSTRACT

Early New Orleans jazz musicians considered theater work to be an essential platform for career building, as seen in photographs illustrating the frequency and range of costumes used in performances on the vaudeville stage, including masquerades as roustabouts, plantation field hands, rubes, police, street urchins, railroad workers, and increasingly as sophisticated swells in tuxedoes. Such representations not only established personal and band identities for marketing purposes but also drew broadly on the city’s eccentricities, exploiting the racial ambiguities intrinsic to creolization, Carnival, and the Storyville sex-trade experiment. Musicians such as King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Prima, and Louis Armstrong engaged in various forms of racial and cultural shapeshifting—via racial cross-dressing, value-laden attire, or language—and sometimes had it imposed upon them. Beguiling Northern audiences by packaging a spectacular new music in Southern stereotypes promoted both access and dissonance, overcoming resistance with novelty while pandering to perceptions of Southern peculiarity. Although such masquerades can be viewed as demeaning, there is utility in viewing them as a means to an end, a pragmatic response to the challenges associated with bringing New Orleans jazz to outsiders who lacked insight into the complexity and variety that informed the city’s unique popular culture at home.